Overview

The brightest literary star of the year 2000 came out of South America, but flashes of incandescent brilliance appeared in other areas of the world as well. With La fiesta del chivo, Mario Vargas Llosa of Peru produced what many readers considered Latin America’s finest novel ever. Interweaving three separate narratives in a series of alternating chapters, Vargas Llosa chronicled the 31-year reign and ultimate demise of Dominican Republic dictator Rafael Trujillo and evoked the chaos and confusion that followed Trujillo’s 1961 assassination.

Nobel Prize winner Derek Walcott of St. Lucia also took up a Caribbean theme in his book-length poem Tiepolo’s Hound. Walcott examined his own life and that of Impressionist painter Camille Pissarro. The volume’s dual narrative highlighted their shared experiences of exile and artistic achievement as well as the cultural influences of Europe and the West Indies, which created a certain division in each of them.

Russian author Viktor Pelevin (seeBiographies) led a banner year in Eastern European fiction with his wildly imaginative novel Buddha’s Little Finger, a hallucinatory recasting of the life of the legendary Bolshevik commander Vasily Chapayev as told by a time-traveling asylum inmate.

Acclaimed Hungarian author György (“George”) Konrád brought out Stonedial, a striking work that combined elements of the intellectual teaser and whodunit with the more expansive tapestry of a historical novel covering the years from World War II through the early 1990s.

Chinese novelist Mo Yan—famed for the scathing satire and historical sweep of such works as Red Sorghum (1993) and The Garlic Ballads (1995)—produced an even more stunning novel, the savage and hallucinatory farce The Republic of Wine. Following alarming reports of widespread corruption and infanticidal cannibalism in the province of Liquorland, Communist Party officials dispatch a special investigator to the scene, but he himself soon falls prey to debauchery and mental breakdown and fails to survive the province’s insidiously pervasive (and wildly funny) destructive tendencies.

Sri Lankan-born Canadian writer Michael Ondaatje published Anil’s Ghost, a superb novel set in his native country during its vicious mid-1980s civil war. Though the politically tinged murder mystery that dominates the main plotline is never fully resolved, the novel succeeds beautifully in all other aspects.

In the gripping novel In Search of Walid Masoud, Arab author Jabra Ibrahim Jabra tracked the disappearance of a Palestinian intellectual who had been a member of an organization engaged in the armed struggle against Israel. The author artfully used a lengthy but disconnected tape recording of jumbled utterances to compose a series of revealing monologues that together produced a penetrating study of both individual and national character.

English

United Kingdom.

Although many critics complained that 2000 was a thin year for fiction, a number of literary debuts showed promise. The most remarkable one was that of Zadie Smith, whose White Teeth was a panoramic and germane tale addressing issues of ethnic and cultural hybridity in northwestern London. The novel, which sold robustly, was penned by Smith while she was a student at the University of Cambridge and was greeted enthusiastically for its ambitious scope and confident characterizations.

Another promising newcomer was Jason Cowley. He was hyped on the cover of his Unknown Pleasures as a “cool, edgy new voice,” but The Literary Review, though praising his book for its feverish readability, found his style more old-fashioned, with “more than a hint” of Graham Greene. Meanwhile Kristin Kenway’s Precious Thing, an acerbic tale of a disillusioned anarchist in search of love, was compared to Martin Amis’s debut novel, The Rachel Papers (1973). Among the most praised fictional titles of the year were two collections of short stories. Equal Love by Peter Ho Davies was hailed as a “feat of ventriloquism.” Though the stories’ themes were unexceptional (a funeral, a hospital visit, or marital problems), they were infused with a graceful quirkiness that lifted them above the mundane. The nine stories in Anita Desai’s Diamond Dust constituted an unsentimental examination of overlapping cultures; in one of the most striking, “Winterscape,” two old Indian widows visiting Canada see snow for the first time. Another novel singled out for particular praise was John Banville’s Eclipse, a story about an actor whose career ends when he dies on stage; it was greeted by The Guardian newspaper as a “spectacularly beautiful . . . work of art.”

Other offerings from more established fiction writers were met with varying levels of enthusiasm. Will Self’s third novel, How the Dead Live—about the death of a middle-aged woman from cancer—showed more humanity than his glitteringly clever earlier books, but some critics found it, like many other novels of the year, too long at 404 pages. Michèle Roberts’s The Looking Glass, an exuberant tale of an orphan’s way through the world, examined the complexity of feminine needs and projected desires. Doris Lessing, entering her ninth decade, delivered Ben, in the World—a sequel to her best-selling The Fifth Child, published 12 years earlier—but most agreed that it failed to match the forcefulness of its predecessor.

Besides the aforementioned, other Booker Prize hopefuls included Julian Barnes, A.S. Byatt, Muriel Spark, and Fay Weldon, but they were passed over in favour of four somewhat obscure authors. Three of those four short-listed had together sold only 553 copies of their works. Only Kazuo Ishiguro and Margaret Atwood were instantly recognizable. The Observer newspaper noted that all the selections had strong narratives and predicted that the millennial shortlist would prove a turning point away from the more innovatory offerings of past years.

Nevertheless, the clear favourite—the bookmakers put it as an odds-on winner at two-to-one—was The Blind Assassin by Atwood, the doyenne of Canadian fiction. A structurally baroque account of an elderly woman looking back on her life and her relationship with a long-dead novelist sister, the book welded together themes of rivalry, female fulfillment, politics, and history. Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans—a detective story set in 1930s England, where the sleuth investigated the disappearance of his own parents—was the second odds-on favourite. Critics found in these pages the assurance displayed in Ishiguro’s earlier winner, The Remains of the Day (1989). Though the lesser-known works were ranked as outsiders, many fancied The Hiding Place by Trezza Azzopardi. The only debut novel on the shortlist, it was narrated by a gambler’s daughter from the Maltese community living in the Welsh town of Cardiff in the 1960s. Michael Collins, at 36, was the youngest writer represented. His third novel, The Keepers of Truth, was a story about a burnt-out local reporter in the U.S. Midwest. Matthew Kneale’s English Passengers, a historical novel about a 19th-century voyage to Tasmania, was given only a six-to-one chance, while Brian O’Doherty’s The Deposition of Father McGreevy (1999) was judged the least likely to win. The latter was a tale of rural Ireland narrated by a defrocked priest.

Atwood, who had been short-listed three times earlier (The Handmaid’s Tale [1985], Cat’s Eye [1988], and Alias Grace [1996]), was victorious. Simon Jenkins, the chairman of the judges, declared that the panel had agreed that her book was “far reaching, dramatic and structurally superb,” demonstrating Atwood’s “poet’s eye for both telling detail and psychological truth.”

The winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction, awarded annually to a woman novelist, was Linda Grant for her When I Lived in Modern Times. The work told of a Soho hairdresser who travels to 1940s Palestine to become a citizen of the new country of Israel at its formation. Soon after she was announced as the unanimous choice of the judges, she faced accusations of plagiarism. A.J. Sherman claimed that she had overly relied on his academic study Mandate Days (1997) for her period detail and for certain passages. Although Sherman dismissed the allegations, Grant and her publisher, Granta Books, agreed to acknowledge his book in future editions.

The world’s richest literary prize, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, worth £Ir 100,000 (about $120,000), went to Nicola Barker, the 34-year-old author of Wide Open (1998). This novel dealt with a group of mismatched individuals struggling to live on a remote island amid a backdrop of startlingly funny Magic Realism. The judges praised the book’s “razor-sharp comic sensibility and flawless structure.”

The Carnegie Medal, a major award for a children’s or young-adult book, went to Aidan Chambers for Postcards from No Man’s Land (1999). Owing to the frank treatment of such themes as adultery, homosexuality, and euthanasia, the choice surprised some. The author, a 65-year-old former monk, defended his outspokenness: “At 15 people . . . are very interested in thinking about important questions for the first time. . . . I refuse to sell young people short by compromising on language or subject matter.”

The other children’s author to capture headlines was J.K. Rowling. Her Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, the fourth in the blockbuster series, appeared amid a frenzy of advance publicity and anticipation. Its publisher, Bloomsbury, arranged a special tour for Rowling upon a steam-engine train dubbed “Hogwarts Express,” the name of the magic train in the story. Despite her phenomenal commercial success, the author narrowly missed winning the Whitbread Book of the Year Award for Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (1999). The judges were reportedly divided between Rowling and poet Seamus Heaney, whose translation and adaptation of the Old English epic Beowulf (1999) had been rapturously received by the critics. One of the judges, biographer Anthony Holden, commented, “Potter is charming, but I think it’s derivative, traditional and not particularly well-written, and to compare it to Heaney is absurd.” Another judge, writer Robert Harris, countered that it was time to close the gap between the “arbiters of literary taste” and the reading public. After a 5-to-4 vote, the award, worth £21,000 (about $34,000), went to Heaney. Former model Jerry Hall, whose appointment as a judge had been interpreted as a gesture toward acknowledging popular taste, voted with the Heaney faction.

Martin Amis (seeBiographies) released one of the most discussed nonfiction titles, his long-anticipated memoir, Experience. It was praised as both “entertaining” and “profound.” There were accusations, however, that Amis had affected to be closer than in fact he was to his cousin Lucy Partington, who had been famously kidnapped and murdered in 1973. Nevertheless, the book was deemed a success both as an autobiography and as a depiction of Amis’s close relationship with his late father, novelist Kingsley Amis.

Another major autobiography was Max Hastings’s Going to the Wars, a portrait of decades of war reporting in Northern Ireland, Biafra, Indochina, Jordan, and the Falkland Islands (Islas Malvinas). Anecdotal rather than analytic, it was praised for casting some fresh light on how modern-day wars had been fought. World War II continued to provide fodder for more scholarly questioning. Eric A. Johnson’s massive Nazi Terror: The Gestapo, Jews, and Ordinary Germans (1999) reappraised the extent to which “ordinary Germans” could be held jointly responsible for the genocide of Jews in the Nazi camps. He concluded that most citizens were not as terrorized by the Gestapo as had been assumed and could have known what was really happening to those transported to the camps; on the other hand, he warned that their culpability and lack of moral concern might be found in any society where there was deeply embedded hostility “to those perceived as outsiders.” William Shawcross, meanwhile, questioned whether the United Nations had the ability to prevent such atrocities in the future. His Deliver Us from Evil: Warlords & Peacekeepers in a World of Endless Conflict concluded that the mushrooming of horrific local wars, refugees, and mass killings would be addressed effectively only if the UN’s Charter could be fully realized.

History was a recurring theme of the year, dominated by Simon Schama’s epic A History of Britain: At the Edge of the World?: 3000 BC–AD 1603, the first of two volumes accompanying a highly successful BBC documentary series and described as “magnificent” by The Guardian. Philip Wilkinson’s What Did the Romans Do for Us? was published to complement another BBC documentary series and discussed the legacy (including bridges, roads, decorative arts, and cuisine) of the 400-year Roman occupation of Great Britain. Another major best-seller was the paperback edition of The Isles: A History by Norman Davies. It challenged the anglocentricity of other such histories and stressed the importance of the influence of Wales, Scotland, and Ireland on the British Isles as a whole. The Times (London) hailed it as a masterwork, declaring it a “tract for the times.”

Also noteworthy was Piers Brendon’s 880-page narrative, The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s. Its main theme was the role of propaganda and falsehood in a European society still dominated by class. A refreshing historical analysis came from The Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Political Thought. Edited by Christopher Rowe and Malcolm Schofield, this collection of scholarly and eloquent essays probed how the ancients viewed and ran their societies and how their ideals of loyalty to the state and security evolved along with their development of differing kinds of constitutions.

Among the biographies was a scrupulously researched account by Claire Harman of Fanny Burney, the novelist whom Virginia Woolf once described as the “mother of English fiction.” Burney’s long and illustrious life straddled the 18th and 19th centuries, but her biographer had to sift through a phlethora of rumour and gossip—some of it engendered by Burney herself—in order to present a faithful portrait. Janet Todd in Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life similarly dispensed with myth when she disregarded the heroine worship that had surfaced in hindsight for the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) and dispassionately conveyed a woman who was far from perfect. Samuel Pepys by Stephen Coote was said to be the first life portrait of the famous Restoration diarist in a generation and depicted Pepys’s relationship with his contemporaries, including architect Christopher Wren. A more unusual offering was Peter Ackroyd’s remarkable London: A Biography; the author explained that the city was for him a “living organism” and thus not a subject of mere history or geography.

Among the literary figures who died were Dame Barbara Cartland, the best-selling author of popular romantic fiction, and Penelope Fitzgerald, a novelist of quiet incisiveness who in 1999 had won a PEN award for lifetime achievement.

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